


Long Drive

by imkerfuffled



Series: 25 Days of Ficlet Prompts [15]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3682344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint screws up big time on a mission. He's left with a soaking wet Natasha covered in putty arrow, two unwanted hostages, and one very long car ride to dwell on it all. What's worse: Natasha is royally pissed off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Drive

Nobody driving down the interstate would have guessed the beat up, orange Dodge Challenger held two world-class assassins, a pair of married smugglers, and enough silent tension to make anyone squirm, but that was exactly what it did.

Clint sat behind the wheel, pushing his speed well beyond the legal limits (i.e. he drove the same speed as everyone else), Natasha rode shotgun with a sopping wet shirt and a scowl, and the smugglers were strapped awkwardly in the backseat, gagged and blindfolded with their hands and ankles tied. One was a woman with fashionable blond hair and a strong jaw, while her husband had watery eyes and a dog allergy, if his frequent sneezing was anything to go by.

As they zipped past their third exit sign, Natasha glared straight ahead of her with her arms crossed, periodically clenching and unclenching her jaw. She didn’t say a word.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Clint muttered when the silence became too much to bear. Like Natasha, he kept his eyes on the road, but unlike Natasha, he did so because he didn’t dare look her in the eye.

The only indication that she heard him was a slight tightening of her crossed arms, and a deepened crease in the middle of her forehead.

“Um…” he snaked a hand behind his neck and scratched it uncomfortably. “I never meant to push you in the pool.”

“I’m not mad about the pool,” Natasha snapped.

“Really? ‘Cause you seem pretty mad about the p—” he stopped talking before she stabbed him in the leg.

The prisoners squirmed in the backseat, and in the front seat the assassins fell silent once more.

“Sorry I hit you with that putty arrow,” Clint tried again.

“ _That_ I’m a little mad about,” Natasha admitted, “You ruined my favorite jeans.”

“Sorry,” he repeated, “I can take you shopping to make up for it.”

“Sure,” said Natasha, still in that clipped tone of voice that said he would be in the doghouse even if he bought her twelve pairs of jeans.

For another few miles, they drove in silence, broken only by a sneezing fit from the scrawny male smuggler. Clint kept shooting glances at Natasha out of the corner of his eye, trying to gauge the extent of her murderous mood. The prognosis: not good.

He considered his options. Either he could continue talking—hopefully stumbling across the thing that made Natasha angry, but more probably making things even worse—or he could shut up and let her simmer until she exploded.

“Sorry I almost blew up the stuff they stole from us,” he blurted out.

Natasha narrowed her eyes, and Clint decided he’d do best to stop talking.

“Hey, at least you got them back, right?” he laughed nervously instead. The smuggled SHIELD weapons were currently sitting at the bottom of the trunk underneath a pair of golf clubs belonging to Natasha’s alias.

“Oh, sorry I hit you with a golf club,” he added.

Natasha didn’t respond, but she did touch the golf club-shaped bruise on her arm. Clint winced.

Unseen by Clint, the scrawny smuggler started wriggling again and moving his jaw around the gag, but all that came out were muffled noises. Natasha turned her glare on him through the rearview mirror.

“Are you going to scream again?’ she asked, sliding a long knife out of her putty-covered back pocket.

“What? No! …Oh,” Clint’s eyes shot wide open before he realized who she was talking to.

The smuggler shook his head emphatically, and Natasha reached into the backseat to rip the gag over his chin.

“Er…” he said, his voice wavering, “Where are you taking us, Nancy?”

“My name isn’t Nancy,” Natasha said, while the smuggler’s wife kicked him in the shin with her bound feet. “And if we wanted you to know where you were headed, we wouldn’t have blindfolded you.

 “Seriously, he never figured out those were aliases?” Clint said, “Even after we kidnapped him and stuck him in my car?”

“Which we wouldn’t have had to do if you hadn’t been caught,” Natasha pointed out.

“Sorry,” he cringed, “But really, your name was Nancy and my name was Drew. Bro, put the futzing pieces togeth—” Natasha shot him a glare, and this time he listened to his own advice and stopped talking.

After a few strained seconds, the smuggler spoke up again, “So, um… What should we call you?”

His wife started banging her head repeatedly against the back of her seat. Clint had a feeling he knew which one of them had been the brains behind their smuggling operation.

“You can call me Black Widow,” Natasha said with a grin.

The smuggler’s eyes widened in fear, and his wife froze. He stopped trying to make conversation after that.

Natasha glanced back to better see their reactions, and her eyes narrowed again, this time in concern. “Clint, you might want to slow d—”

Suddenly, sirens started blaring behind them.

“FUTZ!” Clint shouted, spinning around to find the police car, “What do I do?”

“Pull over.”

“Natasha, we have prisoners in the backseat and twice stolen, secret weapons in the trunk!”

“ _Just do it!”_

He twisted the wheel, still looking over his shoulder, and slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. The police car pulled in behind him. Clint watched as the officer stepped out of the car, shut the door with an ominous  _clunk,_ and began walking toward Clint’s Dodge Challenger while Natasha rummaged in the glove box for something.

The officer reached Clint’s window and peered inside.

“Okay,” Clint told him, opening his door to get out, “I know this looks bad, but…”

The smuggler let out a bloodcurdling scream…

And Natasha lunged across Clint and stabbed the officer with her Widow’s Bite, taken from the glove compartment while neither of them were looking. The officer fell to the ground with a shout, in full view of the busy highway.

“Drive, Дурак!” she yelled, slamming the door shut as she leapt back into her seat.

Clint stomped on the gas pedal.

“Nat, he shouted as he merged back onto the highway, ignoring the panicked looks of drivers beside him, “Why are you so mad at me?”

“Is now really the time?” Natasha shouted back. She flashed her knife in the smuggler’s face, and he stopped screaming in an instant.

“Yes is it!” Clint said. The speedometer climbed just shy of fifty mph. “I know I messed up a bunch on this op, but you’ve said you’re not pissed ‘cause of anything I’ve listed so far, and you were mad  _before_ I nearly got us arrested, so I need to know what I did wrong so I can never ever do it again.”

Sixty mph. Natasha leveled him a deadly stare. “Clint, I’m not mad at you for any one thing. I’m mad at you for the sum total of  _everything.”_ Seventy mph. “You managed to screw up  _every single part_ of that mission. If it weren’t so damn  _stupid,_ I’d actually be impressed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop. Apologizing.”

“S—okay.” Eighty mph.

In the backseat, the smuggler muttered under his breath, “This is going to be a long car ride.”

His wife kicked him again.


End file.
